Why Elektra is the wrong approach (Was Re: The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management)

[Avi Alkalay]

On 4/3/06, Horst von Brand <vonbrand at inf.utfsm.cl> wrote:
> That is the crux of the matter: Glorious schemes for world domination "if
> only everybody will agree on the same configuration file syntax" are thrown
> around here, but the ones in charge of adopting said syntax have
> historically shown very, very little desire to agree on a syntax.

Here comes the role of distributions as the integrator.
This is why I say each of these projects (Apache, Samba, everything on
/etc/*, Gnome, KDE, etc) are a sort of "selfish" and "proprietary"
when it comes to overall integration architecture.



> So your idea is getting rid of configuration files and push everything into
> LDAP? What if the LDAP server is down?

What if you don't have/want a network?
What if my mother only wants to install a new multimedia keyboard in
her standalone Linux box? She'll have to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf? Or
wait for the distribution's HW detection tool to know how to handle
that? Clearly the best solutions is to let the HW provider know that
X.org configurations are pretty predictable in any distribution, and
it just have to provide some scripts to precisely integrate itself in
X.org configuration schema, instead of having to "compile", understand
and regenerate /etc/X11/xorg.conf only to install itself. Being so
difficult, this HW provider will simply, obviously, declare they do
not support Linux.

Avi